July 30, 2025 • 24 mins
Horror, violence and disgusting soup in Tibetan-style Buddhism. Why don't they get as much attention as sex? Why is it obvious that these things are not for performance "as written", but some people assume that the sexual aspects are? Something to think about!
#Buddhism #Tibet #Vajrayana #Horror
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:06):
Hello dear listeners, thank you for being here, and a special thanks if you are one of those faithful listeners
who is returning.
This is the Double Dorje podcast, series 2 no less, episode 4.
I'm Alex Wilding and this episode is going to look at the themes of horror, violence and revolting soups.
(00:31):
I have a feeling that looking at these topics is going to tell us as much about our own Western
society and its reaction to the enormously different culture of Tibet, as it will tell us about that Tibetan culture.
Well, we'll see.
First of all, of course, a little aside, please do remember to like, subscribe, tell your friends or whatever is appropriate.
(00:58):
I'll say that only once.
Okay, I will say it once more at the end.
Now, it's a puzzle.
If we look at some of the stuff that's written and said in popular media about Tibetan styles of Buddhism,
there does seem to be one aspect that's often missing.
(01:19):
Much of that stuff is ill-informed, of course, but that's not a special feature of Buddhism.
An awful lot of what's out there on the internet, especially on social media, is ill-informed,
after all, whatever it's about.
Quite often, that popular material focusses on the place of sex in Tibetan Buddhism.
(01:42):
Some of the material vastly over-inflates its importance and then either goes off on a fantastical journey involving
sex cults and all the rest of it, or on the other hand is outraged and uses a very literal
reading of these admittedly problematic texts as a basis for what they see as taking down the whole Vajrayana thing.
(02:10):
This topic was touched on in episode 14 of the previous series.
I'll put it in a nutshell, a small nutshell, perhaps a peanut shell, yes, there is an optional advanced little
corner of Tibetan Buddhist practise where sex is used, possibly with great power, but it's not nearly as important as
(02:33):
you might think when you look at Tibetan iconography.
In any case, my purpose here is not so much either to revisit that territory or to go into it
more deeply.
My purpose really is simply to point out that this issue of sex is talked about and talked about.
And talked about. But the apparent violence doesn't get so much attention, although it is all over much of the symbolism
(03:00):
and is referred to in the liturgy, I think even more than sex is.
So why are there plenty of people who run around saying, "Oh, Tibetan Buddhism, it's all about sex",
but there are very few people who run around saying, "Oh, Tibetan Buddhism, it's all about violence and disgusting soup"?
(03:24):
I'll get to one or two details about that in a few minutes.
I do rather think that this tells us a lot about the high level of sexualisation and sexual fascination of
our Western culture, rather than saying anything about Tibetan-style Buddhism.
Let's remember that the paintings and statues of deities in sexual embrace are not generally felt or intended to be
(03:50):
sexy in our Western sense, though they do represent the completeness and the ecstasy of realisation.
Many practitioners will visualise themselves, depending, of course, on the particular practise that they're doing, as
deities of a gender other than their physical gender, or visualise themselves as a pair of deities in embrace.
(04:14):
It is very common in probably all the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism for people, regardless of whether they are men
or women, to visualise themselves at a certain stage, particularly before or during a guru yoga, as Vajrayogini.
Vajrayogini is usually red, 16-year-old, naked girl standing on one leg.
(04:43):
The sexual union represents the union of sun and moon, mother and father, wisdom and method, left and right, day
and night, and so on.
This is not at all uncommon.
It may be a fact that the actual enactment of sex is used as one way - actually said to be
(05:04):
a way for inferior students - to implement the bliss related to the third of the four empowerments. Yes, technical terms,
because this is an obscure, abstruse point, and is not very relevant to most practitioners.
Most Christians, after all, don't want to be nailed to a cross, and don't expect to be.
(05:27):
I'm also sure that neither do most of them want to nail other people to a cross.
I'm not so naive as to imagine that back a thousand or more years ago, in whatever Indian religious context
things like the Kalachakra Tantra were born, that a literal enactment of some of the descriptions in the canonical
(05:51):
text were never ever carried out, or that in its beginnings this was a purely dramatic but symbolic meditation exercise.
Then again, I am also not so naive as to imagine that over the same thousand or more years that
this has been practised in Tibet, the Tibetans have never been inclined to act these things out literally.
(06:17):
Nor again is it realistic to pretend that every teacher of Tibetan Buddhism is a spotless soul who would never
pervert their religion by abusing students.
We should remember in all of this that when we consider the texts of what are known as the High
Tantras, and especially the parts that do involve both sex and yuck, that such material was in its day a
(06:45):
literary genre.
It is more than conceivable that authors were vying with one another, each trying to break more taboos, to be
more transgressive about what is acceptable than the author before them.
In modern times, Trungpa Mukpo and Sogyal Lakar are two cases that are particularly well known in the West.
(07:07):
Some would say that we have heard about them ad nauseum, so for that reason I will mention a third
case, there are more, but a third case, Robert Spatz, who is less familiar in the English-speaking world as
he is Belgian and has been active in France and Portugal in those languages rather than in English.
(07:30):
Accounts of his earlier life are a little bit cloudy, especially as regards the transition period from being a TV
repairman in Brussels, which is after all a fair and honest job, to being a Rinpoche returning from a stay
in Darjeeling, announcing that his teacher had given him the title of Lama and encouraged him to establish a teaching
(07:52):
centre in Europe.
Court cases about the behaviour of Robert Spatz went back and forth for years, case and appeal and rejection and
appeal and so on.
Eventually he was fined and given a suspended prison sentence for hostage-taking, physical and sexual abuse of minors,
(08:17):
control and financial fraud.
A lot of information came out about what had been going on as a result of all this argy-bargy.
(08:38):
I remember there was a poster on Reddit who claimed that Spatz did not pervert anything, but simply followed Tibetan
Buddhism by the book.
This poster quoted from some material related to the Kalachakra Tantra that describes empowerment through touching the
breasts of a female between the ages of 12 and 20.
(09:03):
To be honest, I'm not quite sure whether that poster was making this point in defence of Robert Spatz, or
was making it as an attack on Tibetan Buddhism.
I think it was the second, but anyway, whichever way it was, there is a response, in the form of
a question.
Why did Spatz choose to take the sexual contact with minors literally, but not the injunctions to eat shit and drink piss?
(09:30):
Yes, this is the yuck part.
We've almost got to the bit about the yuck.
Just as a traffic island in the flow of what I'm saying, I do want to say that I don't
know a great deal about the Kalachakra Tantra, and I've never felt drawn to it, but it is there and
can't be entirely ignored.
(09:52):
Okay, the yuck.
Imagine, if you will, that you are an innocent attendee at a Karma Kagyu centre.
Let's say it's in the south of England.
Everything is flowers and cakes in the tea room, people are being very nice, sometimes they have jumble sales to
(10:13):
raise money for the centre.
You do know that there is a picture or statue of the Black Cloaked protector to the side of the
shrine, to which cups of tea are offered.
It's a little bit like going to church, but rather more exotic.
At some point, you attend a session involving chanting, and you are given a copy of the short prayer to
(10:38):
this version of Mahakala.
Is this a secret practise?
Technically, I think it really is, but it's actually very common.
(11:00):
The text asks the reader to see the impure world as having been purified, and then pictures a cup or
bowl made of the top of a human skull, placed on a hearth made of three more human skulls, with
a fire in the middle.
Quite outside of Buddhism, of course, a hearth made of three stones with a fire in the middle was a
(11:24):
very common, simple way of looking after a fire.
If you're given a translation of this prayer, it will probably say that the skull contains the five meats and
five nectars, and that these are boiled up, whereupon mantric syllables convert these contents into delicious amrita,
(11:44):
another name for nectar.
Like so many of these things, amrita or nectar appears in different forms in different practices.
For instance, in the Vajrasattva purification, the nectar is like pure crystal water, or sometimes like milk, but
anyway, white, extremely pure, like wonderful water, only more delicious.
(12:09):
Here, though, it's not the same.
You may not yet be clear why this would be described as yucky, but you should know that the five
meats are dog flesh, and of course, Indians generally don't like dogs, cow flesh, and cows, of course, are sacred
in India, and you should never eat it, horse flesh, elephant flesh, and finally, the great meat.
(12:35):
You might have guessed it, the great meat is human flesh.
As for the five nectars, it gets a little more colourful, I think.
These are excrement, urine, semen, brains, and blood, probably menstrual blood.
There are some much coarser words for these things, starting with poo and piss, and I will leave those out,
(12:56):
although I suspect in the original texts the words chosen were fairly crude.
It is my guess that it must be fairly obvious to anybody with common sense that while all this is
extremely dramatic and colourful, you may say over-colourful, it is laden with symbolism, a symbolism that is detailed,
(13:19):
complex, and operates on many levels, and talking about that kind of thing in any detail would definitely be going
too far, not just for reasons of time, but because it's the kind of thing that only serious students want
to be interested in.
Although what I have already said is supposedly secret, it is so easy to find out that it seems rather
(13:44):
foolish to worry too much about revealing secrets.
On an actual shrine, this offering is likely to be represented by a container of tea and a biscuit or
a cake, ideally a traditional torma made according to the traditional prescription.
(14:05):
It must also be pretty obvious that we would not expect the real ingredients, as they have just been named,
to be put into this kapala, as a skullcap is called, and used for meditation, ritual, or indeed for consumption.
I do find it amusing to remember that somewhere I read a warning from a highly respected author, I think
(14:30):
it was in one of Tsele Natsok Rangdrol's texts, though to be honest I'm not sure anymore, about accepting medicinal
nectar pills from certain yogis.
These would be the yogis who would indeed use the real ingredients, and who would believe that they had the
meditation power to really transform them into divine nectar, but who did not in fact have that power.
(14:59):
Taking such pills is not a good thing.
There is an obvious overlap here with attitudes surrounding the ludicrous idea of crazy wisdom.
As we've seen in previous episodes, the crazy wisdom justification used by certain teachers in the West takes the form
(15:21):
of having lots of sex, thinking that that is okay, even when the girls are underage, but the crazy wisdom
master involved does nevertheless avoid going to sleep in the gutter and eating rubbish foods such as human corpses.
Having mentioned that, you might want to google Aghori, A-G-H-O-R-I, in this connection.
(15:44):
The Aghoris are not Buddhists, but they do relate to the social milieu from which some of this tantric material originated.
Maybe there is indeed something in the idea of crazy wisdom, but I do rather doubt that it involves having
sex with pretty young girls, while having one's food served in strict accordance with the precise rules of silver service.
(16:09):
So we've spoken about sex, we've spoken about yuck, but even though the Mahakala prayer I just referred to asks
Mahakala to destroy the enemies of the Karmapa's teaching and reduce them to dust, this is actually still relatively mild.
You will find liturgies that refer to lakes of blood, the smoke of burning human fat, the blaring of trumpets
(16:33):
made of human bones, and the clatter of drums made from human skulls, and to rivers of blood gushing from
the bodies of enemies.
A total vision of horror.
What is going on here?
If we remember the fact that these things are meant to be visualised clearly and vividly, but that there is
(16:55):
no serious suggestion of acting this out physically, I suggest that what we have here is a mechanism that provides
a way to relate to the dark side of the human mind, possibly even to transform it and use it
to get some leverage on the path to enlightenment.
(17:16):
Many gentle, sane Western people will enjoy horror movies.
Some of them, although this isn't me, even enjoy slasher movies.
There may be a connection between certain kinds of mental illness and the enjoyment of extreme video violence -
I don't know, it's not my field.
But as a general rule, there doesn't seem to be a strong relationship between enjoying horror movies and developing
(17:42):
violent behaviours.
Perhaps there is some - I believe the jury may still be out on this question - but in any case, it
seems clear that in most of our societies, we need one way or another of relating to, perhaps even taming,
this dark side of the mind.
Think of Grimm's fairy tales.
(18:04):
Think of the darker kinds of folk song, horror films, what have you.
Which is an issue to think about.
Picture yourself, if you will, in a monastery high in the mountains.
You have been given permission to enter a darkened shrine room to the side, one that is normally off limits
(18:30):
to riffraff like you and me.
Against one wall, largely but not totally hidden by curtains, you can almost make out the figures of protector deities,
holding their skull cups full of blood, wearing their bone ornaments and wielding their weapons.
On the walls of the room, there are paintings of dismembered bodies, while a narrow wall shelf is crammed with
(18:56):
bottles of high strength hooch, a range and variety worthy of any desperate bar at the bad end of a
maritime city.
Masks, with their features in a look of horror, hang from the ceiling, while a couple of monks on duty
keep up the constant recitation of the propitiatory chants.
(19:28):
Once again, the question arises of - what's all that about?
There is a strong sense of dark forces, in some ways external and in some ways the expressions of our
mind, having been contained, bound and pressed into the service of our well-being.
Something again to think about.
(19:58):
The potentially horrifying descriptions of a dismembered body also turn up in the famous practise of chöd.
In an attempt to imitate the pronunciation, this word is often written with two dots over the O, an umlaut
in other words, but I'm not sure whether the transcript systems we are using at the moment always handle this
(20:21):
kind of letter properly, so you may or may not see it there.
In this case, it is our own bodies that we imagine being decapitated, dismembered and made into a delicious soup,
worthy of offering to the Buddhas, the Bodhisattvas, to protective deities, indeed to all sentient beings and, in
(20:45):
particular, this is a part of the chöd system, to our enemies and those to whom we owe some kind
of karmic debt.
In some liturgies, this is presented very quickly, a snicker-snack with the ritual knife, and there we are with
a huge skull bowl, shimmering and steaming in all its deliciousness.
(21:06):
But in others, the dismemberment of our body is presented in considerable and gruesome detail.
Once again, it's clear that self-harming is not the idea of this practise and is in fact explicitly forbidden,
just in case any foolish young practitioner wants to try and force results and is tempted to get carried away.
(21:32):
I want to return to a couple of points worth thinking about.
Firstly, again, why do so many people obsess over the appearance of sex in this religious imagery, while easily taking
it for granted that the violence is symbolic and represents the destruction, the killing, if you like, of our mental
poisons?
(21:54):
Secondly, why do certain apparent lamas think that what from the point of view of people like me, and probably
you, is undoubtedly sexual abuse, is sanctioned by the Vajrayana, but the consumption of what I will again politely
call transgressive nectars, can be omitted and taken purely symbolically?
(22:15):
In other words, screw the students, especially if they are pretty, perhaps draw the line at truly excessive violence
because you get into trouble for that, and absolutely definitely don't eat the five meats and the five nectars in
anything other than a symbolic way.
That would be yuck.
(22:39):
So, the images of horror like those of sex can indeed have a deep spiritual significance.
That's true if the student or practitioner has received the transmission of these teachings properly and been
instructed properly, as well as being prepared and willing to understand.
But please, please, let's not be too quick to assume that a literal reading of an ancient text, a text
(23:04):
that may well be almost impenetrable without detailed commentary, is the same thing as an accurate reading.
Literal and accurate are not the same thing.
And if somebody wants to enact them literally, then let them really do that.
Eat shit, drink piss and other bodily secretions, and I just might forgive you for having sex with some of
(23:26):
your students.
Do remember, however, that a court of law may not be convinced by some of your explanations.
Okay, we've made it to the end of the Double Dorjé Podcast Series 2 Episode 4.
We are all still alive, I hope, and I also hope that nobody has felt too queasy along the way.
(23:49):
As ever, please remember, if you do like this, then please like, follow, subscribe, and tell your friends.
And remember, there is not much in this world that is quite what it seems.
Bye!
Hello dear listeners, thank you for being here, and a special thanks if you are one of those faithful listeners
who is returning.
This is the Double Dorje podcast, series 2 no less, episode 4.
I'm Alex Wilding and this episode is going to look at the themes of horror, violence and revolting soups.
(00:31):
I have a feeling that looking at these topics is going to tell us as much about our own Western
society and its reaction to the enormously different culture of Tibet, as it will tell us about that Tibetan culture.
Well, we'll see.
First of all, of course, a little aside, please do remember to like, subscribe, tell your friends or whatever is appropriate.
(00:58):
I'll say that only once.
Okay, I will say it once more at the end.
Now, it's a puzzle.
If we look at some of the stuff that's written and said in popular media about Tibetan styles of Buddhism,
there does seem to be one aspect that's often missing.
(01:19):
Much of that stuff is ill-informed, of course, but that's not a special feature of Buddhism.
An awful lot of what's out there on the internet, especially on social media, is ill-informed,
after all, whatever it's about.
Quite often, that popular material focusses on the place of sex in Tibetan Buddhism.
(01:42):
Some of the material vastly over-inflates its importance and then either goes off on a fantastical journey involving
sex cults and all the rest of it, or on the other hand is outraged and uses a very literal
reading of these admittedly problematic texts as a basis for what they see as taking down the whole Vajrayana thing.
(02:10):
This topic was touched on in episode 14 of the previous series.
I'll put it in a nutshell, a small nutshell, perhaps a peanut shell, yes, there is an optional advanced little
corner of Tibetan Buddhist practise where sex is used, possibly with great power, but it's not nearly as important as
(02:33):
you might think when you look at Tibetan iconography.
In any case, my purpose here is not so much either to revisit that territory or to go into it
more deeply.
My purpose really is simply to point out that this issue of sex is talked about and talked about.
And talked about. But the apparent violence doesn't get so much attention, although it is all over much of the symbolism
(03:00):
and is referred to in the liturgy, I think even more than sex is.
So why are there plenty of people who run around saying, "Oh, Tibetan Buddhism, it's all about sex",
but there are very few people who run around saying, "Oh, Tibetan Buddhism, it's all about violence and disgusting soup"?
(03:24):
I'll get to one or two details about that in a few minutes.
I do rather think that this tells us a lot about the high level of sexualisation and sexual fascination of
our Western culture, rather than saying anything about Tibetan-style Buddhism.
Let's remember that the paintings and statues of deities in sexual embrace are not generally felt or intended to be
(03:50):
sexy in our Western sense, though they do represent the completeness and the ecstasy of realisation.
Many practitioners will visualise themselves, depending, of course, on the particular practise that they're doing, as
deities of a gender other than their physical gender, or visualise themselves as a pair of deities in embrace.
(04:14):
It is very common in probably all the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism for people, regardless of whether they are men
or women, to visualise themselves at a certain stage, particularly before or during a guru yoga, as Vajrayogini.
Vajrayogini is usually red, 16-year-old, naked girl standing on one leg.
(04:43):
The sexual union represents the union of sun and moon, mother and father, wisdom and method, left and right, day
and night, and so on.
This is not at all uncommon.
It may be a fact that the actual enactment of sex is used as one way - actually said to be
(05:04):
a way for inferior students - to implement the bliss related to the third of the four empowerments. Yes, technical terms,
because this is an obscure, abstruse point, and is not very relevant to most practitioners.
Most Christians, after all, don't want to be nailed to a cross, and don't expect to be.
(05:27):
I'm also sure that neither do most of them want to nail other people to a cross.
I'm not so naive as to imagine that back a thousand or more years ago, in whatever Indian religious context
things like the Kalachakra Tantra were born, that a literal enactment of some of the descriptions in the canonical
(05:51):
text were never ever carried out, or that in its beginnings this was a purely dramatic but symbolic meditation exercise.
Then again, I am also not so naive as to imagine that over the same thousand or more years that
this has been practised in Tibet, the Tibetans have never been inclined to act these things out literally.
(06:17):
Nor again is it realistic to pretend that every teacher of Tibetan Buddhism is a spotless soul who would never
pervert their religion by abusing students.
We should remember in all of this that when we consider the texts of what are known as the High
Tantras, and especially the parts that do involve both sex and yuck, that such material was in its day a
(06:45):
literary genre.
It is more than conceivable that authors were vying with one another, each trying to break more taboos, to be
more transgressive about what is acceptable than the author before them.
In modern times, Trungpa Mukpo and Sogyal Lakar are two cases that are particularly well known in the West.
(07:07):
Some would say that we have heard about them ad nauseum, so for that reason I will mention a third
case, there are more, but a third case, Robert Spatz, who is less familiar in the English-speaking world as
he is Belgian and has been active in France and Portugal in those languages rather than in English.
(07:30):
Accounts of his earlier life are a little bit cloudy, especially as regards the transition period from being a TV
repairman in Brussels, which is after all a fair and honest job, to being a Rinpoche returning from a stay
in Darjeeling, announcing that his teacher had given him the title of Lama and encouraged him to establish a teaching
(07:52):
centre in Europe.
Court cases about the behaviour of Robert Spatz went back and forth for years, case and appeal and rejection and
appeal and so on.
Eventually he was fined and given a suspended prison sentence for hostage-taking, physical and sexual abuse of minors,
(08:17):
control and financial fraud.
A lot of information came out about what had been going on as a result of all this argy-bargy.
(08:38):
I remember there was a poster on Reddit who claimed that Spatz did not pervert anything, but simply followed Tibetan
Buddhism by the book.
This poster quoted from some material related to the Kalachakra Tantra that describes empowerment through touching the
breasts of a female between the ages of 12 and 20.
(09:03):
To be honest, I'm not quite sure whether that poster was making this point in defence of Robert Spatz, or
was making it as an attack on Tibetan Buddhism.
I think it was the second, but anyway, whichever way it was, there is a response, in the form of
a question.
Why did Spatz choose to take the sexual contact with minors literally, but not the injunctions to eat shit and drink piss?
(09:30):
Yes, this is the yuck part.
We've almost got to the bit about the yuck.
Just as a traffic island in the flow of what I'm saying, I do want to say that I don't
know a great deal about the Kalachakra Tantra, and I've never felt drawn to it, but it is there and
can't be entirely ignored.
(09:52):
Okay, the yuck.
Imagine, if you will, that you are an innocent attendee at a Karma Kagyu centre.
Let's say it's in the south of England.
Everything is flowers and cakes in the tea room, people are being very nice, sometimes they have jumble sales to
(10:13):
raise money for the centre.
You do know that there is a picture or statue of the Black Cloaked protector to the side of the
shrine, to which cups of tea are offered.
It's a little bit like going to church, but rather more exotic.
At some point, you attend a session involving chanting, and you are given a copy of the short prayer to
(10:38):
this version of Mahakala.
Is this a secret practise?
Technically, I think it really is, but it's actually very common.
(11:00):
The text asks the reader to see the impure world as having been purified, and then pictures a cup or
bowl made of the top of a human skull, placed on a hearth made of three more human skulls, with
a fire in the middle.
Quite outside of Buddhism, of course, a hearth made of three stones with a fire in the middle was a
(11:24):
very common, simple way of looking after a fire.
If you're given a translation of this prayer, it will probably say that the skull contains the five meats and
five nectars, and that these are boiled up, whereupon mantric syllables convert these contents into delicious amrita,
(11:44):
another name for nectar.
Like so many of these things, amrita or nectar appears in different forms in different practices.
For instance, in the Vajrasattva purification, the nectar is like pure crystal water, or sometimes like milk, but
anyway, white, extremely pure, like wonderful water, only more delicious.
(12:09):
Here, though, it's not the same.
You may not yet be clear why this would be described as yucky, but you should know that the five
meats are dog flesh, and of course, Indians generally don't like dogs, cow flesh, and cows, of course, are sacred
in India, and you should never eat it, horse flesh, elephant flesh, and finally, the great meat.
(12:35):
You might have guessed it, the great meat is human flesh.
As for the five nectars, it gets a little more colourful, I think.
These are excrement, urine, semen, brains, and blood, probably menstrual blood.
There are some much coarser words for these things, starting with poo and piss, and I will leave those out,
(12:56):
although I suspect in the original texts the words chosen were fairly crude.
It is my guess that it must be fairly obvious to anybody with common sense that while all this is
extremely dramatic and colourful, you may say over-colourful, it is laden with symbolism, a symbolism that is detailed,
(13:19):
complex, and operates on many levels, and talking about that kind of thing in any detail would definitely be going
too far, not just for reasons of time, but because it's the kind of thing that only serious students want
to be interested in.
Although what I have already said is supposedly secret, it is so easy to find out that it seems rather
(13:44):
foolish to worry too much about revealing secrets.
On an actual shrine, this offering is likely to be represented by a container of tea and a biscuit or
a cake, ideally a traditional torma made according to the traditional prescription.
(14:05):
It must also be pretty obvious that we would not expect the real ingredients, as they have just been named,
to be put into this kapala, as a skullcap is called, and used for meditation, ritual, or indeed for consumption.
I do find it amusing to remember that somewhere I read a warning from a highly respected author, I think
(14:30):
it was in one of Tsele Natsok Rangdrol's texts, though to be honest I'm not sure anymore, about accepting medicinal
nectar pills from certain yogis.
These would be the yogis who would indeed use the real ingredients, and who would believe that they had the
meditation power to really transform them into divine nectar, but who did not in fact have that power.
(14:59):
Taking such pills is not a good thing.
There is an obvious overlap here with attitudes surrounding the ludicrous idea of crazy wisdom.
As we've seen in previous episodes, the crazy wisdom justification used by certain teachers in the West takes the form
(15:21):
of having lots of sex, thinking that that is okay, even when the girls are underage, but the crazy wisdom
master involved does nevertheless avoid going to sleep in the gutter and eating rubbish foods such as human corpses.
Having mentioned that, you might want to google Aghori, A-G-H-O-R-I, in this connection.
(15:44):
The Aghoris are not Buddhists, but they do relate to the social milieu from which some of this tantric material originated.
Maybe there is indeed something in the idea of crazy wisdom, but I do rather doubt that it involves having
sex with pretty young girls, while having one's food served in strict accordance with the precise rules of silver service.
(16:09):
So we've spoken about sex, we've spoken about yuck, but even though the Mahakala prayer I just referred to asks
Mahakala to destroy the enemies of the Karmapa's teaching and reduce them to dust, this is actually still relatively mild.
You will find liturgies that refer to lakes of blood, the smoke of burning human fat, the blaring of trumpets
(16:33):
made of human bones, and the clatter of drums made from human skulls, and to rivers of blood gushing from
the bodies of enemies.
A total vision of horror.
What is going on here?
If we remember the fact that these things are meant to be visualised clearly and vividly, but that there is
(16:55):
no serious suggestion of acting this out physically, I suggest that what we have here is a mechanism that provides
a way to relate to the dark side of the human mind, possibly even to transform it and use it
to get some leverage on the path to enlightenment.
(17:16):
Many gentle, sane Western people will enjoy horror movies.
Some of them, although this isn't me, even enjoy slasher movies.
There may be a connection between certain kinds of mental illness and the enjoyment of extreme video violence -
I don't know, it's not my field.
But as a general rule, there doesn't seem to be a strong relationship between enjoying horror movies and developing
(17:42):
violent behaviours.
Perhaps there is some - I believe the jury may still be out on this question - but in any case, it
seems clear that in most of our societies, we need one way or another of relating to, perhaps even taming,
this dark side of the mind.
Think of Grimm's fairy tales.
(18:04):
Think of the darker kinds of folk song, horror films, what have you.
Which is an issue to think about.
Picture yourself, if you will, in a monastery high in the mountains.
You have been given permission to enter a darkened shrine room to the side, one that is normally off limits
(18:30):
to riffraff like you and me.
Against one wall, largely but not totally hidden by curtains, you can almost make out the figures of protector deities,
holding their skull cups full of blood, wearing their bone ornaments and wielding their weapons.
On the walls of the room, there are paintings of dismembered bodies, while a narrow wall shelf is crammed with
(18:56):
bottles of high strength hooch, a range and variety worthy of any desperate bar at the bad end of a
maritime city.
Masks, with their features in a look of horror, hang from the ceiling, while a couple of monks on duty
keep up the constant recitation of the propitiatory chants.
(19:28):
Once again, the question arises of - what's all that about?
There is a strong sense of dark forces, in some ways external and in some ways the expressions of our
mind, having been contained, bound and pressed into the service of our well-being.
Something again to think about.
(19:58):
The potentially horrifying descriptions of a dismembered body also turn up in the famous practise of chöd.
In an attempt to imitate the pronunciation, this word is often written with two dots over the O, an umlaut
in other words, but I'm not sure whether the transcript systems we are using at the moment always handle this
(20:21):
kind of letter properly, so you may or may not see it there.
In this case, it is our own bodies that we imagine being decapitated, dismembered and made into a delicious soup,
worthy of offering to the Buddhas, the Bodhisattvas, to protective deities, indeed to all sentient beings and, in
(20:45):
particular, this is a part of the chöd system, to our enemies and those to whom we owe some kind
of karmic debt.
In some liturgies, this is presented very quickly, a snicker-snack with the ritual knife, and there we are with
a huge skull bowl, shimmering and steaming in all its deliciousness.
(21:06):
But in others, the dismemberment of our body is presented in considerable and gruesome detail.
Once again, it's clear that self-harming is not the idea of this practise and is in fact explicitly forbidden,
just in case any foolish young practitioner wants to try and force results and is tempted to get carried away.
(21:32):
I want to return to a couple of points worth thinking about.
Firstly, again, why do so many people obsess over the appearance of sex in this religious imagery, while easily taking
it for granted that the violence is symbolic and represents the destruction, the killing, if you like, of our mental
poisons?
(21:54):
Secondly, why do certain apparent lamas think that what from the point of view of people like me, and probably
you, is undoubtedly sexual abuse, is sanctioned by the Vajrayana, but the consumption of what I will again politely
call transgressive nectars, can be omitted and taken purely symbolically?
(22:15):
In other words, screw the students, especially if they are pretty, perhaps draw the line at truly excessive violence
because you get into trouble for that, and absolutely definitely don't eat the five meats and the five nectars in
anything other than a symbolic way.
That would be yuck.
(22:39):
So, the images of horror like those of sex can indeed have a deep spiritual significance.
That's true if the student or practitioner has received the transmission of these teachings properly and been
instructed properly, as well as being prepared and willing to understand.
But please, please, let's not be too quick to assume that a literal reading of an ancient text, a text
(23:04):
that may well be almost impenetrable without detailed commentary, is the same thing as an accurate reading.
Literal and accurate are not the same thing.
And if somebody wants to enact them literally, then let them really do that.
Eat shit, drink piss and other bodily secretions, and I just might forgive you for having sex with some of
(23:26):
your students.
Do remember, however, that a court of law may not be convinced by some of your explanations.
Okay, we've made it to the end of the Double Dorjé Podcast Series 2 Episode 4.
We are all still alive, I hope, and I also hope that nobody has felt too queasy along the way.
(23:49):
As ever, please remember, if you do like this, then please like, follow, subscribe, and tell your friends.
And remember, there is not much in this world that is quite what it seems.
Bye!
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